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- Dec 13, 2015
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Social identities. Human beings have an inherent tendency to form coalitions/groups/identities and to discriminate across them. This is true for all causes of identities, including those resulting from simple coin tosses in social experiments. The concept was pioneered by Henri Tajfel and is prevalent in modern social sciences.
From the inevitable existence of those identities derive the inevitable consequences: outgroup perception, ingroup favoritism, group polarization, outgroup derogation, self-segregation, ... As a result emerge beliefs (grounded or not) of injustice, vulnerability, distrust, superiority and helplessness (see Eidelson & Eidelson).
Simplistically, conflicts occur when one of those feelings become too prevalent and the net cost of conflict decreases.
Regarding the Muslim world, the rise of the Muslim identity results from the relative failure of the national identities. Historically there were tribe identities or imperial identities more often than national ones. People in those countries were disunited, distrusting each other, fragmented, and this made ordinary life unbearable and full of resent and suspicions against everyone (the beliefs mentioned before). Islam was the answer: the only identity able to solder them all and restore the social mesh. And of course religion naturally conditions the outgroup perception to religious considerations, resulting in an increased hostility towards those who do not share the same beliefs, or who violate the religious prescriptions.
Nazism and fascism were born in similar conditions: Germany and Italy were recent and immature nations, fragmented between different identities, in the turmoil of economic crises. Totalitarian ideologies that reformed the social mesh and restored relationships under a common identity have allowed to solder people. They organized movie projections, offered activities for the youth, ...
And what we have today in the West? A multiethnicity and multiculturalism that offer many daily opportunities to create beliefs of injustice, helplessness, vulnerability, superiority and distrust (France is becoming a very defiant country, moving from first-world levels to third-world ones). A weakening national identity that is deliberately undermined to attempt to artificially fabricate an European identity. Because politicians after the ww2 have concluded that the problem was nations and that by destroying them they would destroy social identities conflicts, which is a pathetic and dramatic ignorance of human nature, as later explicated by social sciences.
How does this current situation look to you? In my eyes, this is a recipe for disaster, a belief that human nature can be ignored, that leaves us with a tragic situation. The far-right is not the cause, it is the consequence. It is the main danger but also the only possible source of remedy. Tragic.
Interesting comment ...